Comments wanted: Directory structure of fontinst/inputs/

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Vladimir Volovich wrote:

> this makes cyrillic fontinst files more available because e.g. tetex
> contains fontinst but does not contain cyrfinst; so when fontinst will
> include cyrfinst, it will be more available.

Would be great...

Sorry for being a bit off-topic here but it is quite important since
people come into trouble  again and again (mainly due to the fact that
the standards itself introduced the faults ;-)

> This aliasing mechanism makes it really easy to deal with LOTS of
> fonts with non-standard glyph names. To illustrate that this is useful
....
 
> % aliases for latin part of fontinst
> % derived from AGL, *.enc, *.etx, *.afm
...

> \galias{Tcommaaccent}{Tcedilla}
> \galias{tcommaaccent}{tcedilla}
> %\galias{Scedilla}{Scommaaccent} % AGL 1.1 vs 1.2
> %\galias{scedilla}{scommaaccent} % AGL 1.1 vs 1.2

There is no such character like Tcedilla! As was kindly corrected in AGL
1.2 we have only to deal with Tcommaaccent/Scommaaccent which went after
a few corrective moves into their final Unicode positions (hopefully
;-). It is just like that amacron is not atilde.
Even given the case a font provides Tcedilla and not Tcommaaccent, then
the character is usually wrong. This applies usually to Monotype/M$
fonts. One the other hand side Linotype fonts are OK. Also the new
Adobe-Pro aka OpenType fonts are OK. It is much better to construct a T
with a comma below for the purpose.
For the same reason there is no g, k, l, n, r cedilla.
The real problem case for LaTex is Scedilla vs. Scommaaccent since they
are *both* necessary and to be used for their respective languages.
LaTex defines for T1 encoding on one hand side the wrong Tcedilla slot
which must be filled by Tcommaaccent instead and on the other only a
single slot for Scedilla but not for Scommaaccent (without this you
could drop also the Tcommaaccent). There was a fix for Unicode and AGL
meanwhile but there is no real fix for LaTex T1 encoding! 

Therefore above alias' are indeed not sensible.

> % glyphs absent in AGL:
> %compwordmark cwm bom zerowidthnobreakspace
> %perthousandzero zeroinferior perzero

it is silly to use this instead of the perthousand sign present in
common fonts...

> %Germandbls SS

There is obviously no such character like an upper case ß. If you need
for one reason or another a SS, then fake it.

> %hyphenchar sfthyphen hyphen dash % hanging hyphen

No font has this: it is a pure metric property how far a hyphen hangs
"around" ;-)
It is best constructed within fontinst.

Have fun!

Hilmar Schlegel

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